Honestly, same in Michigan. As the home of American cars our major cities were all overrun by them (Detroit, Grand Rapids, Flint, and Kalamazoo). The main streets of small towns, though, have stayed extremely walk/bikeable (although outskirts of towns have become car wastelands). We've still got one good city (Traverse City) and one meh city (Ann Arbor) left, but each seems as if they're gonna embrace more car dependent life.
@@JosiahKeller IMHO without the "DEMANDS" of LONG distances from work to housing allows smaller areas to NOT "fix" traffic issues with MORE traffic issues
The problem in most places is, the moment you suggest building infrastructure that doesn't completely prioritize cars, the snowflakes start claiming it's a "war on cars".
This is our fight let’s put some solid effort into it. Our ancestors threw grenades into bunkers and shot each other a bunch the least we can do is make a solid effort of campaigning Lmao
issue is 99% OF voters want a BETTER "COMMUTE" and only KNOW DRIVING so anything that does NOT address THERE "needs" is making it worse and add in the modern american "conservative narrative" of late is that "anything the government does is BAD / will fail"
@@mauriceskyliners9873 not nimby's people that can NOT SEE a "better" commute from a transit / active solution on "there" commuter corridor and they are the VOTERS putting these politicians back in office
I just love it when 'snowflakes' has started to be flung in both directions. In both cases, it is justified. It seems all of us used to watch those right-wing debaters such as Ben Shapiro back in the 2010s, since we use these words.
man i fuckin love you guys, not just bikes, climate town, city nerd... youre all just amazing and I wish my country could be so much better without politicians being so panderous to cars
As a planner in Halifax, you guys did a really excellent job of portraying the reality of the city's past, present, and future urbanism in a short and concise video! Excellent content as always.
You work as an urban planner in Halifax? That's so cool! Do you have anything to share about the future development in the city? I'm an Ontarian who has thought about moving there for some time.
As someone who lives in Halifax and has been getting into exploring urbanism TH-cam of late and is really looking to learn more, I would love to hear your insights on some of the challenges you and other fellow planners in the city have had to deal with and how you have been dealing with them.
As a haligonian cyclist, I have loved seeing the slow growth of urbanism around here. We can dream of rail :(. Currently the only rail link we have is a biweekly to Montreal. We really need to develop better though, with a housing crisis and a growing population we just can’t sustain the number of cars required to let everyone have one.
@@tylermckay2586 there’s also the issue of the many feasibility studies that keep saying it’s not economically viable because there’s not enough density along the corridor. If only we would allow more density along the corridor…
@@Lafv chicken / egg issue when the DENSITY is NOT THERE is the time to BUILD TO MUCH transit capacity and "allow" increased density to grow but North America WANTS it the other way around and "fix" an issue with TRANSIT when it is HARDEST to build out as the cars are already there
Before the car, streetcar suburbs was literally how cities we're growing in North America. You build the line, then build a collection of housing to serve it. We've since got to the opposite approach, build a highway and then allow housing on former farmland. See the planned 413 highway in Ontario to expand the Toronto area subdivision development blob beyond Brampton.
I moved from Edmonton to Odense, Denmark population of about 250K for 2 years. It was staggering that a city that size could have a light rail and the amount of bike infrastructure. I miss it everyday, biking every where and an amazingly cute and walkable city center
Würzburg, 130k is trying to expand their tram network (and failing miserably at the moment). I don't know if there is a practical limit on how big a city needs to be for rail based transit. Öhringen, a town of 25k has 3 train stops, but that's not really a tram there (s-bahn - 1435gauge but no toilets and going around 100km/h for 50km or so). It's viable as the trains lead to a much larger city closeby, but I believe there is a lot of local traffic. Small communities have been connected to the mostly rural line and are bustling with new (single family homes) development. Some stops are so small that only 2 doors can be used to enter and exit.
live in Winnipeg and we are around 750K and just got a "rapid (bus) TRANSIT" project - our first - woo hoo mostly grade separated for the full route and there is "talk" about a TRAM but IMHO we NEED commuter rail from the northern towns that are within 1 hour drive of down town and that has ZERO discussion
Already being spoiled by the great Canadian urbanist content on TH-cam, you giving smaller cities some love is quite the bonus! As a small city dweller, all this has inspired me to read up on local urban/transit planning. It's been really encouraging to see more and more reports hitting all the right points when it comes to the values you and other channels talk about.
I was born and raised in a small village in the Netherlands, population 10.000. It was all bikable and walkable. It doesn't even need to be a city at all to achieve that
What's really wild about not allowing apartments everywhere is just how many old 2 and 3 story apartment buildings there are in Halifax, that wouldn't be allowed today
OR "terraced" houses that Montreal have a LOT of but FEW other towns ALLOW outside of high capacity corridors and that is exactly where i DO NOT want my "house" but set back in a quite treed lane NEAR amenities NOT ontop of them
That's common through North America. Most dense places are illegal under their current zoning codes. Somerville MA discovered that only 22 building were "legal", in a city of 70,000 people. And that was before considering parking requirements! Boston? Illegal? San Francisco? Illegal. What's really rich is when people talk about "preserving neighborhood character" while defending laws that make it illegal to build neighborhoods of that character now.
As a European, these are nothing like smaller cities. These are still big cities. I think it's an important distinction since it can affect what transit is considered viable. Countless smaller European cities have trams, and some even have metros: Bilbao (Spain), Lausanne (Swiss), Catania (Italy), Brescia (Italy).
Mixed use is so much more important than density. It doesn't matter how dense a place is if the only store is a walmart by the highway 10 miles away from town
@@Joesolo13 You can have lots of people living in apartments with no store nearby if that is what the zoning calls for, especially in the US, where so many New apartments and suburban subdivisions are denser than old rural towns, but less walkable because there are no shops nearby, people must drive to the big box store.
@@Joesolo13 I actually got an example of awful density! In the outskirts of my city there are some residential developments that are dozens of tall apartment buildings surrounded by a couple of parks and absolutely nothing else. It's really off-putting walking there, just a couple people jogging or walking their dogs and nobody else, because to do anything at all you need to go by car somewhere else. It feels a little dystopian.
I would say that density and mixed use are interrelated in practice. You need some minimum level of density for the mixed use to be practical and supportable. And sufficiently high density requires mixed use, because there is not enough room for everyone to drive to work/school/groceries. But yes, there's still some variation. Where I stayed in Toronto was fairly high density, but my house was buried such that it took 6 minutes to reach anything other than housing, apart from one expensive corner store. Vancouver probably has similar swathes. Whereas in Osaka or Mexico City it was hard to go more than a minute or two without passing a shop.
@@mindstalk You could have supported that expensive convenience store, as it helped to contribute to walkability. The main reason why cars can kill walkability in a place is that it enables people to travel farther to the better or cheaper store, and thus the value of being near customers is lost. I remember reading in a book called Roads to Sata about a man who walked across Japan in the 80s talking about the small villages in hokkaido that had lost their stores because everyone has cars and was able to easily go to Nayoro which was a larger town with better offerings often at better prices than what the local store offered. Some megacities may be somewhat protected from this effect due to their geographically advantageous location as well as people willing to pay more money for things. But without addressing the economics of megastores, supermarkets etc that kill human scaled walkability no amount of Urban Planning will save our places.
Tell me, what's so special about Canada, that all the best urbanist TH-camrs are from there? Mr. Slaughter of NJB, RM of RM Transit, and you two of Oh the Urbanity. Absolutely my favourite TH-camrs. I enjoy the urbanist videos more than I enjoy watching Jackie Chan Adventures.
Hmm. Maybe as Canadians we're in a sweet spot where (1) we have a similar suburban development pattern to the U.S., so we can speak to all of the problems that entails, but (2) we also have less of a stigma around public transit and density and more examples of urbanist successes to model ourselves after? New York City blows everywhere else out of the water, obviously, but the top 3 Canadian cities (Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver) have higher transit ridership per capita than any other U.S. city (to use one metric). It's maybe not a coincidence that many U.S. urbanists (Alan Fisher, Urban Jersey Guy) come from or are based in New Jersey, which has a lot of suburbia but also lots of good examples of urbanism.
Nice video! I’m shocked, however, that you guys haven’t done any videos on Victoria yet. It’s about the same size as Halifax and has the highest mode share of walking and cycling trips in Canada per capita. It is also currently in the process of expanding its protected cycling infrastructure across the entire city (and other municipalities in the region are doing the same). Sadly Victoria seems to be constantly overshadowed by Vancouver even though they’re completely different cities. Edit: Victoria is also the 7th most densely populated city in the country (so better cycling and transit infra makes sense), and is currently working on an initiative to implement a blanket missing middle zoning initiative across the city.
as a Victorian that DID move to Vancouver I can 100% say there is LITTLE in common between those towns like Halifax there is a LOT MORE "European town" feel to these towns then MOST other mid sized CANADIAN AND American towns really wonder what the "missing middle" is going to look like in an area with LAND costs SO HIGH making "asset value destruction" an actual issue and how to build "middle" housing that is AFFORDABLE for the "middle" without shoebox condo's like Vancouver/Toronto
@@jasonriddell middle density housing catering to high income still makes housing more affordable though since housing supply increased and those high income people that move there give room for more affordable housing by leaving the housing they've lived before. Believe they've already done a video on this topic
@@Econunlocked Stats Can has the latest population for the Halifax CMA at 465,703 vs 397,237 for Victoria, so saying Halifax has 7x more people is just factually incorrect.
I live in “Fake London” and had a look at the cycling map recently, and was actually surprised how many protected bike lanes there are, and how many regular bike lanes there are (make them protected please!). But was not surprised that so many bike lanes don’t connect to anything… you’d be biking along on this nice protected bike lane and then come up to 2 blocks where you have to “share the road” to get to the next couple blocks where they resume. It’s a work in progress though and I’m excited to see more developments here!
I lived in London for 2 years and biked downtown on a fairly regular basis. The lane down Queen St. was particularly bad, abruptly transitioning from being nicely protected for a few blocks to spitting you out into the middle of five lanes, the rightmost of which was considered "shared." I always had to turn left two blocks after that transition, so I just stuck to the centre lane and made the lane change to the leftmost lane on the next block, but that was always a pretty harrowing couple of blocks whenever there was any amount of traffic, and on a few different occasions I had drivers (mostly guys in oversized pickup trucks, because London) get uppity about that bit of vehicular cycling. That was ~3 years ago, though, so perhaps it's improved since then.
I appreciate seeing some urbanist channel mention this. As someone who does not like cities and also would like to live (nearly) car free, it is endlessly frustrating how often it seems like the kind of place I want to live and the kind of way I want to live are mutually exclusive. It is possible to have both but so many people think I'm insane for wanting to be able to walk to work and the grocery store while not living in a big city
Well, those things are somewhat contradictory, but not entirely. Small town's centers should absolutely be walkable and accessible but you will only have so many services vs a at least small city. You'll also likely have more of an uphill battle to improvements
I recently moved to Halifax coming from Ottawa and before that Waterloo and London, ON. Definitely felt a big difference in density and walkability here, I am loving it.
As a Haligonian and a cyclist, it's sometimes frustrating to live here. There are small, sporadic sections of great cycling infrastructure. The protected bike lane on Wyse Rd in Dartmouth is a great example. Or the Chain of Lakes trail, which is a great, long shared path that takes you all the way to Bayers Lake. Unfortunately, it's sporadic, as I said. You get some great sections of cycling infrastructure, but none of it really connects with each other. So you're treated to a good bike lane, only to have to weave through traffic when you turn onto another road.
I'm hopeful the current trends of "sporadic" infrastructure in North America expands and links up over the years. Rome wasn't built in a day and all that.
I live in Huntsville, AL, US with a population of 215k and there have been big improvements in adding bike lanes and bus routes the past few years. Not too sure there was even a single bike lane here 5 years ago. I am now able to bike nearly everywhere I need to go in the city.
So much of this can be applied to small towns too. A compact small town with everything you'd need in cycling distance could make car-free or low car living so manageable.
The only problem is getting to the next town over or the nearest city for larger trips - small towns usually don't have inter-city bus service (or if they do, it's once a day and sometimes at odd hours like 3am).
350,000 people, I would call that a bag city. In the Netherlands, there are only four city's bigger then that. I would say that in my experience, a city of 125,000 is much nicer to cycle than one of 500,000. I can just cycle to almost the whole city in 15 minutes, where I find it always a bit annoying to find out that even when I am already in a city, I still need to cycle for an hour to get somewhere.
Halifax certainly felt like a big city when I first moved there! But it's the 13th largest in Canada, so definitely on the smaller side, certainly when compared to the places we've lived more recently.
I live in a city of 22,000. Its small size makes it very bike friendly. It’s easy to ride a bike from a single family home in the city limits to a grocery store, doctor, school, park, or a 20 mile intercity greenway. Yes, we could use better bike infrastructure, and if they could make the historic downtown car free, it would be amazing. But good biking isn’t limited to giant cities.
@@tristanridley1601 - I’m in Ashland, OR. As an older, west coast city, it isn’t all that dense, but it has an older downtown where people walk, the lot sizes aren’t huge, and despite having hills and creeks, most of the residential streets go thru, rather than being cul-de-sacs, so you can avoid the local highway. Most of the speed limits are 25mph or lower, and that helps, even when mixing with cars. I grew up in the LA burbs (Covina), and even it wasn’t bad for cycling. The main reason was the residential grid. As kids, we knew to minimize the time on big roads, and the small roads didn’t prevent thru traffic. It got worse as they added traffic lanes to the bigger streets and as car traffic increased. Newer cities, with large lots, setbacks, stroads, and cul de sacs are terrible. Too many people think that kind of design is normal.
@@JonFairhurst IMHO that is the "default" outcome of LOW population as LOW densities still ALLOWS for SHORT trip distances as NOTHING is far away my WORK is 25 KM away from my house and I do NOT live in a HUGE City but HUGE compared to yours @750K in the prairies
@@jasonriddell Unfortunately, the recent default is businesses on a stroad and low density housing on roads that don’t allow thru traffic (not even ped and cars) in order to reduce traffic. Those neighborhoods force everyone to take a long path to exit onto a high speed thoroughfare. Just terrible. By allowing ped/bike to take residential streets helps, as does a walkable downtown. Our city is about five miles end to end, but our whole community is an a valley, and we have bus service along the main highway, as well as a couple of mixed use paths. It’s so much better than the modern cul de sac suburb and stroad junk they’ve built over the past 50 years or so.
I live in a city of 200k in a county of 400k, so similar in size to Halifax, and while my city is better than most it's size (low bar in America) I'm still amazed and suddenly jealous of what a city this size could be after seeing this. Your videos made me fall in love with Montreal and it might have happened again with Halifax haha
@@shanehiggins4983 it's relative. relative to european cities, it lacks when it comes to urbanism. relative to north american cities, it strives when it comes to urbanism. at least from what I can tell looking at it online
@@je4a301 strives how? We have no trains, busses literally just in the halifax Dartmouth and bedford area, housing is horrible, homelessness is on the rise. What metric are you using?
Also crazy how your benchmark was Halifax, a city with over 300000 inhabitants. Where I live is far from a biking utopia but weirdly enough some of the best urbanism I've seen was on a beach town with less than 100000 permanent inhabitants
Great video! I recently travelled to Denmark, which included stay in the city of Odense, which has 180,000 inhabitants. Even as someone very familiar with the differences in transit and city design between North American and Europe, I was absolutely floored at how amazing the bike infrastructure was in a small-ish city. One can get anywhere safely and comfortably in just a few minutes, and the network connects not only the city itself, but to outlying areas as well. And with the great separation and well thought-out junctions, there are no harrowing moments of cars and trucks passing inches from you while biking, which are everyday occurrences to most bike commuters in North America.
Biking is actually more feasible for smaller cities and towns, there's more of space to build them in alternative paths, there's more space to park bicycles, and scooters. In crowded cities with many high rises, pedestrians + transit should be the priority, cycling infrastructure second.
0:16 as a Maritimer living in BC (albeit northern BC), where I've heard Toronto and Montréal referred to as the East Coast many times, this moment was very funny.
Great video. Edmonton is going through a pretty good urbanism renewal right now and they're dividing the city up into 15-minute districts (smaller than a city, larger than a neigjbourhood). These districts, which are sort of like small cities, actually make it easier and more efficient to plan walkable communities. Small cities need to become more walkable and bikeable before they become too big to walk and bike.
Walkable villages, in the ancient style, are nice to live in. Quiet and close to nature, yet no need to drive everywhere. Driving is only needed to reach the neighbouring village, the city, the campsite, etc. Children can also see their neighbours without relying on parents to drive them, and services such as hairdressing and groceries can be reached without driving. This combines the non-economic advantages of big city life with the advantages of rural life.
So cool to hear people talking about Halifax! By what I'm used to, Halifax is still big.. but they clearly have quite a good development for their size. And I've read their plans.. they're on the right path!
one other thing I wanted to mention is how good Halifax does with mixed use neighborhoods(on the peninsula anyways) even really residential areas usually will have a corner store or two, a pharmacy or a coffee shop or a market or something like that, especially in the North end. Its something I love about this city that I find we do better than even most bigger cities, were I often find myself walking for 15 minutes just to get a bag of chips from a convenience store in some places!
So surreal to see my home on your channel! I thought you did a great job with this video! I agree, we've got a long way to go but it really feels like we've been making big steps in the past 5 years and we have plans laid out to continue. Wish we were seeing bigger changes faster, but sometimes you have to take what you can get...
I'm a Vancouverite. I have never thought of Toronto or Montreal as being on the east coast. When I refer to those two cities, I would say central Canada, or back east. I can't think of anyone I know that would say otherwise.
I grew up in Vancouver, now live in Montreal. I know several people who do not know that I'm talking about the Quebec-Windsor corridor when I say central Canada. I think the fact that Manitoba and Saskatchewan are in the centre when you look at a map combined with the "out east" phrase to mean Toronto or Montreal leads a lot of people raised out west to not know the three generally agreed upon regions of Canada
no one I know would let kids under 14 walk to school or ride a bike alone or even with friends, due to incidents of kidnapping. While a very small incidence, once you know it's a possibility, it just doesn't seem reasonable to send your little kid out on a street alone.
@@michah321prolly a suburban thing. I’m American and I’ve been walking to school since I’m 10 years old and I lived about a 20-25 minute walk away(I live in a small city w a metro of 150000)
I know! I’m less than 10 minutes from my school, but I can’t even bike there due to the only connection to the school being a busy stroad with no sidewalk
I lived in Londonontario (that's how people pronounce it) for years and biked to work downtown a lot. There were fantastic multi-use pathways along the river, but there were missing safe links to get from the river paths to the actual core. Before I moved away I was chatting with the deputy mayor about the need to protect some corridors for future transit right-of-ways. His response was "There's no need. We'll never be big enough for a subway." Sigh.
I was just thinking about this yesterday! What a great video. There can be places which are bike friendly, walkable, with high density condos/apartments with quality amenities that aren't always mega-cities. Great work! I can think of multiple off the top of my head here in the lower 48.
Really happy to see a video on Halifax :) I think you guys did a great job explaining the kind of attitude Halifax has toward urbanism - we have a fairly progressive council and we are slowly moving in the right direction, but it seems like we’re too scared to really make big changes to break away from the status quo. Our provincial government also loves to get in the way of good things. For example, council has approved a really nice-looking plan for a proper BRT system, but the province is unwilling to do their part in funding it. (Not to mention that the province is now fast-tracking a bunch of sprawl developments on the edges of the city). Not to put all the blame on the province - council could also do things better - but NS doesn’t make it any easier. Basically, there are lots of plans to do really great things but it seems like we have issues with actually getting anything done. It’s the same thing with bike infrastructure - we were supposed to have a lot more than we do by now.
Halifax and Victoria have ONE "big city" issue and that is lack of LAND to "sprawl" onto developers / banks LOVE LOW DENSITY / LOW COST developments that sell for high markups and the well known "always expanding" economies makes "urbanism a HARD SELL
thanks for doing this. Here in NJ, we have lots of small municipalities. My town has a population of about 12,000. BUT, the density in NJ is on a par with the Netherlands. My town has a higher population density than Atlanta and many other American cities. But when you talk about things related to "urbanism" people in my town immediately assume it's not for the us. "That might work in NY, but not in our small town". That's an incorrect understanding.
Oh my goodness please come to Winnipeg. We are so stuck here. Rampant NIMBYism, short term mindset, half-ass everything. We dig ourselves a little deeper every year.
And just a short boat ride away from Halifax is the coastal town of Portland, Maine, which also has fabulous (and very similar looking) urbanism for a small city.
I went to university in Victoria which is basically Halifax's west coast identical twin. My experience was very similar and I bring it up to people all the time. It's the perfect city for students, and there are a lot of them there but it's not a true college town either, it's a rea city in its own right. Because of the cities relative age and close together destinations it's perfect for students who can't afford a car. But nobody will even fathom the possibility of rail based transit of any kind. Seriously, never had a conversation go past a 5 sentence exchange about it.
I see more and more discussions about it now though, as well as quite a bit of urbanist thinking/terminology leaking into city planning. Getting BRT along the main corridors between the various municipalities is almost inevitable at this point (think one is already under construction). That should be a nice incremental step to see what paths and what types of rail transport would be most appropriate for the region.
@@Tuasmanque yes, I believe you are right. From what I gather they are copying Translink's RapidBus both in name and application (which if you don't know is like downgraded BRT.) Last time I was in Vic they had built a bunch of new cue jumps for the 70. Great news! They especially need bus lanes and better stations downtown. I just find it interesting how hard it is for people to imagine the CRD having rail transit.
I grew up in Victoria and even when I was younger in the 90's Transit was talked about with streetcars down town and "heavy" metro running towards Calwood to bypass / alleviate the "Calwood crawl" traffic jams that happened as people left work in Victoria / Saanich and headed towards the "northern communities"
@@jasonriddell colwood crawl is still alive and well. And still called that even by car less uni students who’ve never even been to colwood lol. They just did a huge highway project and surprise surprise it didn’t do a heck of a lot. I heard there was a train service up island in the 90s? That’s gone now.
I think it's safe to say the Colwood Crawl is a big reason the first rapidbus line is going to be along that downtown-westshore corridor. As far as I can tell this would've happened even without the snafu that was the McKenzie overpass project, but having in recent memory that certainly helps with public support.
I think smaller cities can learn a few lessons from Emmen, the Netherlands. It's a city of ~100k people and essentially the answer to "what if the Dutch had more space?" For Dutch metrics, it's very car friendly, and does have lots of visitors from the rural areas around it. In terms of flats and towers, there are only a few. However, it still has fully separated bicycle infrastructure, and cycling is generally safe anywhere.
Two of my favorite missing middle fairly dense cities in America are Lancaster PA and Frederick MD. Absolutely gorgeous architecture and walkable historic districts.
Lived in Halifax for 2 years in the late 80's while my wife was getting her masters at Dalhousie. Without a car, didn't even have a drivers license, we rarely even needed to leave the Halifax Peninsula with almost everything within a easy walk and occasional the bus. Still miss Halifax.
The required density for walkability and for transit to be economically viable is laughably low. The current number is around 25 people per acre. Considering the fact that the average US household in 2022 had 2.5 people and 1/10th acre lots are not uncommon in urban areas, you can theoretically achieve that density with just detached single family housing (not that I prefer that). I think walking/cycling/transit infrastructure is totally possible in most cities, as long as the city makes a commitment to it.
1:10 I think anyone that has seen any video from the NotJustBikes channel, has heard about this city. He is responsible for many views changing on how infrastructure should be, and opened the door for people to be interested on knowing and researching more about this topic. I (personally) got interested on the content of this channel, because of all the changes on my personal perspective, after watching the videos from NotJustBikes. 🙂
Halifax is an interesting subject aright now. We are experiencing immense growth at the moment, over 20,000 people moved into the city last year alone, and there are plans for even more growth. This influx of people is almost forcing the city to pick up urbanist planning unintentionally in order to attempt to house the new people arriving and provide them ways to get around without clogging up existing roadways. Almost every development that is coming up lately is mixed use residential towers with commercial ground level spaces. Bike lanes and transit improvements are happening because they know damn well what tens of thousands more motorists would do to the city. Problem is this is still only really happening in the core (and a couple popular suburbs) and the rest of the city is kind of being ignored. Transit "fixes" improved service among busy corridors, but they left those in areas off the core routes often in worse conditions, with service levels reduced in frequency and sometimes ending earlier in the day than before the changes. Bike infrastructure is certainly improving on the peninsula and in downtown Dartmouth, but outlying areas like Spryfield are woefully unserviced. A "safe" bike trip downtown from Spryfield requires using painted bike gutters on a dangerous road (at least one notable bike accident sent someone to the trauma ward recently) and sidewalks, or if you want to take a more protected way, you have to bike completely out of your way to Fairview and then use the meandering infrastructure and back streets from that direction, turning a 20 minute bike ride into around 40 minutes. That same influx of population that is driving more urbanist development though is also massively driving up our cost of housing due to lack of it available, and also contributing to a massive health crisis as we do not have nearly enough doctors, nurses, and paramedics to serve the existing population, never mind the massive growth. This is causing a major backlash against the urbanist developments as people are rightfully concerned about where government priorities are lying.
Is it reasonable though to expect frequent service out in the burbs? People make their choices about where to live, and those have consequences. In the core? Transit, walkable. Burbs? Designed to use a car to get everywhere.
@OG0dinwolf more specifically suburbs designed with primarily single family home zoning. If more mixed use zoning was legal throughout both urban and suburban areas like you will find in a lot of European municipalities, there would be more of an expectation of greater transit and active transportation infrastructure throughout. The Netherlands was on a path to more car-centric development just a little over 30 years ago, until them made a conscious effort to make a change. It starts with political willpower, and until we can convince a majority of Halifax's suburban councilors to look at urbanism in a positive light, convince more MLAs and by extension the Premier help develop better policies to support urbanist visions, and convince more of the public that live in the suburbs of the benefits for them as much as for those who live on or near the peninsula/downtown Dartmouth, the more likelihood we will see more positive change throughout the HRM, not just in the areas that are already fairly dense.
@@bearcubdaycare That's the problem: All of the development and efforts to improve infrastructure are focused on the core, with relatively few efforts to densify the suburban areas, make them more functional as standalone neighbourhoods so people don't need to drive into the core to do everything, or establish better transit routes that will allow them to get to the peninsula (noting that many of the people who have been priced out of living on the peninsula still have to work there) without driving. The peninsula has exactly five roads that go to and from it, only one of which has any real potential to expand (two are bridges, two are right on the coast and have no room to grow, and the last one is a more typical highway but feeds into city streets that can't handle much more traffic than they already do without bulldozing a huge chunk of the city). It's not a question of what level of transit service is reasonable to expect in the burbs. It's a question of what level of transit service needs to be provided to the burbs to keep the city from being gridlocked for ten hours a day. It's also worth noting that the Spryfield-Downtown trip mentioned here is only about 10 km. We're not talking about some far-flung suburb that only the most hardcore cyclists would ever try biking from. There are quite a few decent hills involved (which is just the nature of biking anywhere in Halifax), but it's well within reasonable cycling commute distance. The only reason it's not particularly viable is the road design and lack of infrastructure, which should absolutely be called out as a design failure (there's zero reason the road in question couldn't have a protected bike lane instead of a painted bike gutter) and not dismissed as being somehow inevitable because it's a suburb. Even the HRM's suburbs are relatively dense and not tremendously far from the city centre; it really would not take much to move away from car-centric design to something that works better and can grow sustainably.
You can really see the decades in Halifax's street design. Having grown up in downtown and later moving to Dartmouth, I have to say the difference was painful and had severe negative impacts on my development. That being said, Dartmouth was still somehow nicer than the suburbs where I live now, because for all the cul de sacs and bizarrely aligned streets, there was also an incredible system of walking paths to help me get around. Even when my school was on the other side of a lake, there were forest shortcuts I could take, or at the very least a decent sidewalk on the regular route, and a nearby bus terminal with an express bus to Dalhousie and St Marys (which had signal priority). Of course, it was still completely unwalkable, and ridiculously hilly to the point that biking was just not an option, and the isolation of being in a suburb did take its toll on me compared to the connectivity of downtown.
Yay Halifax coverage! I do think that in certain areas on the peninsula, the 15 minute neighbourhood has properly been achieved. It is exciting to see the development of mixed zoning slowly trickle out.
I lived in Halifax for many years and enjoyed the waterfront area. I then moved to Banff and then Calgary. While Banff is very walkable, I found downtown Calgary to be a place best to avoid if one does not work there as there is not much to do there during the day. I do miss the Halifax/Dartmouth waterfronts with its Busker Festival and other lively activities. I used to walk around Halifax a lot and it felt welcoming plus I could avoid major roads by cutting through various neighbourhoods. Here in Calgary, most neighbourhoods are cut off from each other with fences, often by major roadways that are always super busy.
In March of last year I had to move away from Halifax, the city I grew up in, because it was too expensive for me to live there. As someone who doesn't drive it that city is still very unfriendly unless you are actually downtown. I live in Vancouver now and have a one bedroom that is only $100 more than my bachelor in Halifax, and my wage is half again higher. The large population growth people champion in Halifax over the last few years have left a lot of us native Haligonians in the dust. I'm always sad to see videos about one of my favourite cities I'll never live in again.
Thank you so much for a video on Halifax! I’ve lived here almost my whole life and there have been major improvements lately. You mentioned the transit corridor on Spring Garden, and the main reason it failed is because they decided to start the “pilot project” at the exact time that a parallel street (the best detour route for drivers) was closed for replacing pipes. I think they have plans to return it and I really hope they do!
the main reason it failed is because they expect drivers to respect small signs, as it that works for anything else. Simple bollards to allow bus through, but stop cars is what was needed.
I lived in Halifax while the Spring Garden work was being done and then afterwards as well and not once did I ever hear that it was supposed to be a dedicated but lane. Like this is literally the first time I've heard that. Wild. It makes sense looking at the design of the road which now gets extremely clogged, but every intersection along that stretch is just open and it's not at all obvious that cars are only meant to cross and not turn onto Spring Garden.
I've been advocating for more urbanist ideas in my small city of 65,000. There are challenges that come along with it, but I see a lot of potential, the benefit of a city this size is it already isn't super spread out, sure it is for it's size, but on a human scale, you could bike from one end of the city to the other in around 30 minutes, this means fewer miles of bike infrastructure has a big impact, the city has a bus service, and I've found it's decent in many ways, but there is a lot of potential for it to be monumentally better for a very affordable cost to taxpayers. I'm working on starting a blog to discuss these issues more in detail to target at people who live here, I'm combining it with information on city services, government, things to do, and even ways to save money to attract readers to the blog, and I've been networking with some more forward thinking groups and professional organizations in the city.
I live in an area where small rural towns of under 2,000 rresidents When I told a city councilmen that it would be nice to be able to walk or bike from any point in the town to any other point in the town, they balked at the idea wondering "why would anyone want to do that?" To say the least, only the "old core" of the town (build in the early 1920s) is even remotely walkable. The councilmen then went on about how adding sidewalks and dedicated bike lanes is completely impractical because the town is "too spread out".
@@WillmobilePlus You act as if there is some sort of zero sum where improving and expanding pedestrian, cycling, and mass transit infrastructure must come at the expense of cars. Not only is that obviously rediculus, but shows that you are the extreamist. You think cars should be the only option.
@@WillmobilePlus > sidewalks cost a LOT of money. Guess what, roads cost a lot more money to both build and maintain. And yet, you don’t see people complaining that a road exists. But that also isn't an argument against expanding pedestrian and cycling infrastructure. > not to mention utterly useless in a rural area because the amount of cars that come through doesn't warrant it Pedestrian and cycling infrastructure is as useful in rural areas as roads are. In fact, I would argue they would be MORE useful in a rural area than in an urban environment. > many of the roads may be under the jurisdiction of your state's DOT Then why do I see sidewalks along the state roads when they pass through the "old" parts of town? It's because those towns chose to build them back in the 20s and 30s and put up bonds to finance for them.
Wishing something local will happen in Hobart, but I feel like we're more likely going to need a NZ-style intervention Recently a truck stopped traffic for hours, and it brought back memories of when we could've built 1 piece of major public transport for 1/5 the cost of a single highway bridge they're building instead
Thanks for covering Canadian city urban design and advocating for healthier, more walkable and bikable neighbourhoods. Something far too many Canadian cities seem to be going in the opposite direction with. Check out Manitoba cities for some horror stories. A big, brand new neighbourhood and not ONE grocery store within reasonable walking or biking distance. Not one STORE period within walking/biking distance. And even if you wanted to bike - very unsafe, almost no dedicated biking lanes and a big main road to go past to get to the major shopping centre. The problem is the system incentives. We live in a very anti-economical system where the healthy, just and sustainable thing to do, based on science, isn't often done because it doesn't comply with the maximize profit and competitive self-interest demand of the market system. All backwards economics. But so many people don't recognize the root problem. I still appreciate the look at these cities and showing what good urban design does look like and how it CAN be done in Canadian cities.
Nice video! I visited Halifax this summer and was really impressed with the walkability downtown, although I was less impressed with the roads in other parts of the city.
Thank you so much for covering small cities in this video! Though i do find it funny that we in North America consider a city with a population of 350k "small." In Europe that would be a major city with several regional rail connections and commuter rail, plus like 3-4 tram lines, lol. I think it's very important to highlight that urbanism is something that affects everyone, not just big cities, and I think you do a great job illustrating that with this video. In some ways, smaller cities in North America can benefit more from density and transit, because there's less pressure from state DoTs (or whatever the Canadian equivalent is) to push through massive highways to support the higher populations. I really do hope that we can expand urbanism from being only a big city concept to also covering our smaller cities. Thanks for your hard work!
Nice one, fight for it,I lived in the Netherlands and oh boy whatan amazing countryto cycle from the big cities to a small vilages, andow do I miss that healthy and practical cycling
Bicycle infrastucture in useful in towns of every size. Even in towns with a population of only 10,000 people, the main roads should have cycling lanes.
This point is really important. Adding to the arguments of the video, if we think at the regional level, we need smaller city to be less car-dependant to make sure an eventual railroad network would be popular enough to justify its existence. Even though it is possible and quite easy to live car-free in Montréal for example, it's really hard to get out of the city and go visit smaller cities without using a car and folks of smaller cities are encouraged to keep their car as it is the best way to meet their transportation needs at the local and regional level.
Thanks for this video. I advocate for improving transit and active transportation infrastructure in my town of Whitehorse,Yukon. I often struggle to dispute the opposition that says Whitehorse is too small for such accommodations. Whitehorse has a population of about 35,000 people or about 10% of Halifax. I am interested in your views on urbanism int this size category.
Damn I have so much love for Halifax. Moving there after highschool was my first introduction to a car-free lifestyle and it had such a profound impact on me. Also lmao at my little cameo
My only critique: The metropolitan area of Halifax is home to roughly 480,000. 13th largest municipality in Canada. (12th if you amalgamate Hamilton with the GTA)
The census statistics provided (population and commuting figures) were not for the census metropolitan area (CMA), they were for the population centre (POPCTR). Halifax's CMA boundaries are abnormally large and rural due to the size of HRM. Population centre boundaries (previously called "urban area" boundaries) are usually a better comparison of cities, because they ignore municipal boundaries and simply count all connected urban/suburban development. In other words, when giving statistics on Halifax as a city, we want to include Dartmouth and Bedford but not Enfield or Sheet Harbour or all the other towns and rural areas that aren't functionally part of the "city".
7:00 10 min _ride_ from a grocery store Where I live, grocery stores are mostly within a 5 min _walk._ I have 6 grocery stores within a 5 min walk door to door 😀
@@OhTheUrbanity , I see but this extreme case scenario is unimaginable for me :) We've got two huge grocery networks in my country. One of them got really aggressive a few years ago and started occupying land so that no other competitors can fit in. It's become so ubiquitous that some of its stores nearly face each other across a street. A meme got viral then with a futuristic cityscape all covered in its shop-signs. Both networks also penetrate in every new residential development and occupy the usually commercial first floor of every residential high-rise. If I'm not mistaken, Starbucks had a similar aggressive policy to become the default coffee place. I could think of low density suburbs but I don't consider them part of the city. However, suburbs are not residential-only so they have some facilities pretty close to single family homes, unlike in the US or Canada. And while I'm at it, not all places are as lucky. Some cities allow pure residential-only high-rise districts. We call them human ant-hills. No schools, no kindergartens, bad public transport, traffic jams. Just infinite high-rise fields with no vision other than developers making money as fast as possible.
Victoria BC is the perfect comparison for Halifax. Greater Victoria has a population of 400,000, it's a coastal city with a dense core, and a growing number of protected bike lanes.
You should consider visiting Victoria, BC. It is pretty much a twin of Halifax but on the west coast. It is the 7th most dense city in canada, number one in mode shift away from cars in Canada, and has a walkscore of 76 and bikescore of 80. These statistics being so high are probably partly due to weird municipal boundaries, but still impressive for north america. Victoria also has a lot of nice "urban villages" which are nice walkable areas outside of downtown. There have been a lot of new protected bike lanes recently, but unfortunately the transit isn't the best.
@@Swiss2025 All capital cities do not necessarily have better infrastructure than other cities, especially if the other city is larger than the capital. Even though I think that victoria is relatively good for urbanism for its size in North America, I would say that Vancouver has better infrastructure. For example, the transit system in Vancouver is much better than Victoria's.
So true car centric places are by choice and not reserved for big cities. My small Ontario town is a bit car centric if you live too far from the core. Besides that, I usually feel pretty safe biking and walking to all my needs. I am moving to a largish city in Ontario with better bike infrastructure than London, Ontario. I am going to be in between places for a short time but one area we will be is very car centric even though it has multi-use paths. However, another part of the city is way more walkable and less car centric.
Uytae!! 😅 Halifax has a lot of potential for bike infrastructure. Probably more so than the cities on the prairies in terms of the mindset of the locals. Nice to see they've already made a (tentative) start!
I still see people crying online over not having Harbour Drive, saying that the resistance to it was an example of elitist south-enders blocking the utility of poor suburbanites who need to drive from Dartmouth to Spryfield. As someone who wants to destroy the South End mcmansions and install dense public housing, I would rather that area still be free from a highway disconnecting Point Pleasant Park from the rest of the city!
I lived in Halifax for a couple years before I had to move away for work just prior to the pandemic, and I've been longing to get back. It's a city with such good bones and potential if there was a proper push to keep developing it around modern (or 100 year old) urbanist principles. Even off the peninsula itself there are lots of good areas that could be made even better with just a little bit more active and public transportation and loosening of low-density mandates. And good lord there's a need to reduce car traffic getting on/off the peninsula. It's hard to imagine anyone thinking waiting in line at the Armdale Roundabout is the best way to get to work, were there other practical options available.
I’m always blown away by how much more “urban” the main streets of little towns are in Indiana compared to vast swaths of Indianapolis.
Small/rural college towns are usually the best for bikeability & walkability in America.
Honestly, same in Michigan. As the home of American cars our major cities were all overrun by them (Detroit, Grand Rapids, Flint, and Kalamazoo). The main streets of small towns, though, have stayed extremely walk/bikeable (although outskirts of towns have become car wastelands).
We've still got one good city (Traverse City) and one meh city (Ann Arbor) left, but each seems as if they're gonna embrace more car dependent life.
@@JosiahKeller IMHO without the "DEMANDS" of LONG distances from work to housing allows smaller areas to NOT "fix" traffic issues with MORE traffic issues
@@spiriten Detroit look like a mf SUBURB 💔💔💔
@@thenotoriousmichaeljackson8938 Yeah... Grand Rapids and Detroit are basically examples of what happens when you design a city entirely around cars.
The problem in most places is, the moment you suggest building infrastructure that doesn't completely prioritize cars, the snowflakes start claiming it's a "war on cars".
a guy suggests a street that doesn't completely give way to cars. the nimbys say: "we unfairly stigmatize motorists, it's shameful"
This is our fight let’s put some solid effort into it. Our ancestors threw grenades into bunkers and shot each other a bunch the least we can do is make a solid effort of campaigning Lmao
issue is 99% OF voters want a BETTER "COMMUTE" and only KNOW DRIVING so anything that does NOT address THERE "needs" is making it worse and add in the modern american "conservative narrative" of late is that "anything the government does is BAD / will fail"
@@mauriceskyliners9873 not nimby's people that can NOT SEE a "better" commute from a transit / active solution on "there" commuter corridor and they are the VOTERS putting these politicians back in office
I just love it when 'snowflakes' has started to be flung in both directions. In both cases, it is justified. It seems all of us used to watch those right-wing debaters such as Ben Shapiro back in the 2010s, since we use these words.
man i fuckin love you guys, not just bikes, climate town, city nerd... youre all just amazing and I wish my country could be so much better without politicians being so panderous to cars
Appreciated!
@@OhTheUrbanitythank uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu
As a planner in Halifax, you guys did a really excellent job of portraying the reality of the city's past, present, and future urbanism in a short and concise video! Excellent content as always.
You work as an urban planner in Halifax? That's so cool! Do you have anything to share about the future development in the city? I'm an Ontarian who has thought about moving there for some time.
Hello from Halifax England to Halifax Canada
As someone who lives in Halifax and has been getting into exploring urbanism TH-cam of late and is really looking to learn more, I would love to hear your insights on some of the challenges you and other fellow planners in the city have had to deal with and how you have been dealing with them.
As a haligonian cyclist, I have loved seeing the slow growth of urbanism around here. We can dream of rail :(. Currently the only rail link we have is a biweekly to Montreal. We really need to develop better though, with a housing crisis and a growing population we just can’t sustain the number of cars required to let everyone have one.
What we need is to tackle the issue of CN, they are the only thing stopping us from having decent commuter rail
@@tylermckay2586 there’s also the issue of the many feasibility studies that keep saying it’s not economically viable because there’s not enough density along the corridor.
If only we would allow more density along the corridor…
@@Lafv chicken / egg issue
when the DENSITY is NOT THERE is the time to BUILD TO MUCH transit capacity and "allow" increased density to grow
but North America WANTS it the other way around and "fix" an issue with TRANSIT when it is HARDEST to build out as the cars are already there
@@jasonriddell good point, we need integrated transportation and land use planning so it doesn’t have to be a chicken/egg issue
Before the car, streetcar suburbs was literally how cities we're growing in North America. You build the line, then build a collection of housing to serve it.
We've since got to the opposite approach, build a highway and then allow housing on former farmland. See the planned 413 highway in Ontario to expand the Toronto area subdivision development blob beyond Brampton.
I moved from Edmonton to Odense, Denmark population of about 250K for 2 years. It was staggering that a city that size could have a light rail and the amount of bike infrastructure. I miss it everyday, biking every where and an amazingly cute and walkable city center
Würzburg, 130k is trying to expand their tram network (and failing miserably at the moment). I don't know if there is a practical limit on how big a city needs to be for rail based transit. Öhringen, a town of 25k has 3 train stops, but that's not really a tram there (s-bahn - 1435gauge but no toilets and going around 100km/h for 50km or so). It's viable as the trains lead to a much larger city closeby, but I believe there is a lot of local traffic. Small communities have been connected to the mostly rural line and are bustling with new (single family homes) development. Some stops are so small that only 2 doors can be used to enter and exit.
live in Winnipeg and we are around 750K and just got a "rapid (bus) TRANSIT" project - our first - woo hoo mostly grade separated for the full route and there is "talk" about a TRAM
but IMHO we NEED commuter rail from the northern towns that are within 1 hour drive of down town and that has ZERO discussion
@jasonriddell it's a journey. And a tram is often a good start with big impact per dollar spent. Systems build upon systems.
Just curious but how did you move to Europe? Visa?
@@jasonriddell I think winnipeg metro population is more than 800,000 people. Winnipeg should build an lrt. It's the right time for them.
Already being spoiled by the great Canadian urbanist content on TH-cam, you giving smaller cities some love is quite the bonus! As a small city dweller, all this has inspired me to read up on local urban/transit planning. It's been really encouraging to see more and more reports hitting all the right points when it comes to the values you and other channels talk about.
I was born and raised in a small village in the Netherlands, population 10.000. It was all bikable and walkable. It doesn't even need to be a city at all to achieve that
What's really wild about not allowing apartments everywhere is just how many old 2 and 3 story apartment buildings there are in Halifax, that wouldn't be allowed today
OR "terraced" houses that Montreal have a LOT of but FEW other towns ALLOW outside of high capacity corridors and that is exactly where i DO NOT want my "house" but set back in a quite treed lane NEAR amenities NOT ontop of them
That's common through North America. Most dense places are illegal under their current zoning codes. Somerville MA discovered that only 22 building were "legal", in a city of 70,000 people. And that was before considering parking requirements!
Boston? Illegal? San Francisco? Illegal.
What's really rich is when people talk about "preserving neighborhood character" while defending laws that make it illegal to build neighborhoods of that character now.
Apartments are just awful to live in. They should be banned outright.
@@jamesmills5972 Your opinion is as silly as it is despicable.
@@mindstalk Its the true, no space no privacy no storage. Horrendous.
As a European, these are nothing like smaller cities. These are still big cities.
I think it's an important distinction since it can affect what transit is considered viable. Countless smaller European cities have trams, and some even have metros: Bilbao (Spain), Lausanne (Swiss), Catania (Italy), Brescia (Italy).
It’s all relative and there’s no objective cutoff, but Halifax is #13 in Canada for population and Canadians would not generally call it a “big city”.
Mixed use is so much more important than density. It doesn't matter how dense a place is if the only store is a walmart by the highway 10 miles away from town
Well, if the only store is a walmart by the highway 10 miles away from town....it isn't dense at all.
@@Joesolo13 You can have lots of people living in apartments with no store nearby if that is what the zoning calls for, especially in the US, where so many New apartments and suburban subdivisions are denser than old rural towns, but less walkable because there are no shops nearby, people must drive to the big box store.
@@Joesolo13 I actually got an example of awful density! In the outskirts of my city there are some residential developments that are dozens of tall apartment buildings surrounded by a couple of parks and absolutely nothing else. It's really off-putting walking there, just a couple people jogging or walking their dogs and nobody else, because to do anything at all you need to go by car somewhere else. It feels a little dystopian.
I would say that density and mixed use are interrelated in practice. You need some minimum level of density for the mixed use to be practical and supportable. And sufficiently high density requires mixed use, because there is not enough room for everyone to drive to work/school/groceries.
But yes, there's still some variation. Where I stayed in Toronto was fairly high density, but my house was buried such that it took 6 minutes to reach anything other than housing, apart from one expensive corner store. Vancouver probably has similar swathes. Whereas in Osaka or Mexico City it was hard to go more than a minute or two without passing a shop.
@@mindstalk You could have supported that expensive convenience store, as it helped to contribute to walkability. The main reason why cars can kill walkability in a place is that it enables people to travel farther to the better or cheaper store, and thus the value of being near customers is lost. I remember reading in a book called Roads to Sata about a man who walked across Japan in the 80s talking about the small villages in hokkaido that had lost their stores because everyone has cars and was able to easily go to Nayoro which was a larger town with better offerings often at better prices than what the local store offered.
Some megacities may be somewhat protected from this effect due to their geographically advantageous location as well as people willing to pay more money for things. But without addressing the economics of megastores, supermarkets etc that kill human scaled walkability no amount of Urban Planning will save our places.
We may never pedestrianize every road and stroad in every city and town, but some cities are better than none.
Tell me, what's so special about Canada, that all the best urbanist TH-camrs are from there? Mr. Slaughter of NJB, RM of RM Transit, and you two of Oh the Urbanity. Absolutely my favourite TH-camrs. I enjoy the urbanist videos more than I enjoy watching Jackie Chan Adventures.
Don't forget Paige Saunders. :)
@@smallmj2886 and Shifter! My fav calgarian
Hmm. Maybe as Canadians we're in a sweet spot where (1) we have a similar suburban development pattern to the U.S., so we can speak to all of the problems that entails, but (2) we also have less of a stigma around public transit and density and more examples of urbanist successes to model ourselves after? New York City blows everywhere else out of the water, obviously, but the top 3 Canadian cities (Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver) have higher transit ridership per capita than any other U.S. city (to use one metric).
It's maybe not a coincidence that many U.S. urbanists (Alan Fisher, Urban Jersey Guy) come from or are based in New Jersey, which has a lot of suburbia but also lots of good examples of urbanism.
@@OhTheUrbanity Very good explanation. I have never seen a city other than New York in the USA with transit like Toronto or Vancouver.
Nice video! I’m shocked, however, that you guys haven’t done any videos on Victoria yet. It’s about the same size as Halifax and has the highest mode share of walking and cycling trips in Canada per capita. It is also currently in the process of expanding its protected cycling infrastructure across the entire city (and other municipalities in the region are doing the same). Sadly Victoria seems to be constantly overshadowed by Vancouver even though they’re completely different cities.
Edit: Victoria is also the 7th most densely populated city in the country (so better cycling and transit infra makes sense), and is currently working on an initiative to implement a blanket missing middle zoning initiative across the city.
as a Victorian that DID move to Vancouver I can 100% say there is LITTLE in common between those towns
like Halifax there is a LOT MORE "European town" feel to these towns then MOST other mid sized CANADIAN AND American towns
really wonder what the "missing middle" is going to look like in an area with LAND costs SO HIGH making "asset value destruction" an actual issue and how to build "middle" housing that is AFFORDABLE for the "middle" without shoebox condo's like Vancouver/Toronto
@@jasonriddell middle density housing catering to high income still makes housing more affordable though since housing supply increased and those high income people that move there give room for more affordable housing by leaving the housing they've lived before. Believe they've already done a video on this topic
Halifax has 7 times more people than Victoria
@@Econunlocked Stats Can has the latest population for the Halifax CMA at 465,703 vs 397,237 for Victoria, so saying Halifax has 7x more people is just factually incorrect.
@@paulw152 yes but from a urban population Halifax has 375,000 and Victoria has 85,792
Excellent video!🎉
Would you consider covering Halifax in some capacity? I'd love to see your opinion on how we could bring rail transit back to the city
Victoria as well, same reasons as above. Victoria is pretty much the same as halifax but west coast.
north of NYC there are so many small river towns and cities along the hudson river that are great examples of small town urbanism in the US.
I live in “Fake London” and had a look at the cycling map recently, and was actually surprised how many protected bike lanes there are, and how many regular bike lanes there are (make them protected please!). But was not surprised that so many bike lanes don’t connect to anything… you’d be biking along on this nice protected bike lane and then come up to 2 blocks where you have to “share the road” to get to the next couple blocks where they resume. It’s a work in progress though and I’m excited to see more developments here!
I lived in London for 2 years and biked downtown on a fairly regular basis. The lane down Queen St. was particularly bad, abruptly transitioning from being nicely protected for a few blocks to spitting you out into the middle of five lanes, the rightmost of which was considered "shared." I always had to turn left two blocks after that transition, so I just stuck to the centre lane and made the lane change to the leftmost lane on the next block, but that was always a pretty harrowing couple of blocks whenever there was any amount of traffic, and on a few different occasions I had drivers (mostly guys in oversized pickup trucks, because London) get uppity about that bit of vehicular cycling. That was ~3 years ago, though, so perhaps it's improved since then.
I appreciate seeing some urbanist channel mention this. As someone who does not like cities and also would like to live (nearly) car free, it is endlessly frustrating how often it seems like the kind of place I want to live and the kind of way I want to live are mutually exclusive. It is possible to have both but so many people think I'm insane for wanting to be able to walk to work and the grocery store while not living in a big city
Well, those things are somewhat contradictory, but not entirely. Small town's centers should absolutely be walkable and accessible but you will only have so many services vs a at least small city. You'll also likely have more of an uphill battle to improvements
I recently moved to Halifax coming from Ottawa and before that Waterloo and London, ON. Definitely felt a big difference in density and walkability here, I am loving it.
As a Haligonian and a cyclist, it's sometimes frustrating to live here. There are small, sporadic sections of great cycling infrastructure. The protected bike lane on Wyse Rd in Dartmouth is a great example. Or the Chain of Lakes trail, which is a great, long shared path that takes you all the way to Bayers Lake.
Unfortunately, it's sporadic, as I said. You get some great sections of cycling infrastructure, but none of it really connects with each other. So you're treated to a good bike lane, only to have to weave through traffic when you turn onto another road.
I'm hopeful the current trends of "sporadic" infrastructure in North America expands and links up over the years. Rome wasn't built in a day and all that.
I live in Huntsville, AL, US with a population of 215k and there have been big improvements in adding bike lanes and bus routes the past few years. Not too sure there was even a single bike lane here 5 years ago. I am now able to bike nearly everywhere I need to go in the city.
So much of this can be applied to small towns too. A compact small town with everything you'd need in cycling distance could make car-free or low car living so manageable.
There’s a reason people in small towns don’t live in the city or even suburbs. It’s not happening.
@@lisamccall3706 this comment was brought to you by general motors
The only problem is getting to the next town over or the nearest city for larger trips - small towns usually don't have inter-city bus service (or if they do, it's once a day and sometimes at odd hours like 3am).
@@AdiposeExpressAgreed. Intercity bus should be expanded!
350,000 people, I would call that a bag city. In the Netherlands, there are only four city's bigger then that. I would say that in my experience, a city of 125,000 is much nicer to cycle than one of 500,000. I can just cycle to almost the whole city in 15 minutes, where I find it always a bit annoying to find out that even when I am already in a city, I still need to cycle for an hour to get somewhere.
Halifax certainly felt like a big city when I first moved there! But it's the 13th largest in Canada, so definitely on the smaller side, certainly when compared to the places we've lived more recently.
I live in a city of 22,000. Its small size makes it very bike friendly. It’s easy to ride a bike from a single family home in the city limits to a grocery store, doctor, school, park, or a 20 mile intercity greenway.
Yes, we could use better bike infrastructure, and if they could make the historic downtown car free, it would be amazing. But good biking isn’t limited to giant cities.
@@tristanridley1601 - I’m in Ashland, OR. As an older, west coast city, it isn’t all that dense, but it has an older downtown where people walk, the lot sizes aren’t huge, and despite having hills and creeks, most of the residential streets go thru, rather than being cul-de-sacs, so you can avoid the local highway. Most of the speed limits are 25mph or lower, and that helps, even when mixing with cars.
I grew up in the LA burbs (Covina), and even it wasn’t bad for cycling. The main reason was the residential grid. As kids, we knew to minimize the time on big roads, and the small roads didn’t prevent thru traffic. It got worse as they added traffic lanes to the bigger streets and as car traffic increased.
Newer cities, with large lots, setbacks, stroads, and cul de sacs are terrible. Too many people think that kind of design is normal.
@@JonFairhurst IMHO that is the "default" outcome of LOW population as LOW densities still ALLOWS for SHORT trip distances as NOTHING is far away
my WORK is 25 KM away from my house and I do NOT live in a HUGE City but HUGE compared to yours @750K in the prairies
@@jasonriddell Unfortunately, the recent default is businesses on a stroad and low density housing on roads that don’t allow thru traffic (not even ped and cars) in order to reduce traffic. Those neighborhoods force everyone to take a long path to exit onto a high speed thoroughfare. Just terrible.
By allowing ped/bike to take residential streets helps, as does a walkable downtown. Our city is about five miles end to end, but our whole community is an a valley, and we have bus service along the main highway, as well as a couple of mixed use paths. It’s so much better than the modern cul de sac suburb and stroad junk they’ve built over the past 50 years or so.
I live in a city of 200k in a county of 400k, so similar in size to Halifax, and while my city is better than most it's size (low bar in America) I'm still amazed and suddenly jealous of what a city this size could be after seeing this. Your videos made me fall in love with Montreal and it might have happened again with Halifax haha
You wouldn't feel that way if you were here, halifax is so far behind when it comes to urbanism. Especially transit
@@shanehiggins4983 it's relative. relative to european cities, it lacks when it comes to urbanism. relative to north american cities, it strives when it comes to urbanism. at least from what I can tell looking at it online
Halifax is amazing
@@je4a301 strives how? We have no trains, busses literally just in the halifax Dartmouth and bedford area, housing is horrible, homelessness is on the rise. What metric are you using?
@@shanehiggins4983 Urban density, mixed use development, walkability, no overwhelming car infrastructure in down town
That karate kick at 1:26 with the guy who realized he was on camera was awesome
That guy with that karate kick in this video has his own TH-cam Channel called *About Here.*
Also crazy how your benchmark was Halifax, a city with over 300000 inhabitants. Where I live is far from a biking utopia but weirdly enough some of the best urbanism I've seen was on a beach town with less than 100000 permanent inhabitants
PEI is becoming a transit utopia, with bike infrastructure and busses across province running every day.
Great video! I recently travelled to Denmark, which included stay in the city of Odense, which has 180,000 inhabitants. Even as someone very familiar with the differences in transit and city design between North American and Europe, I was absolutely floored at how amazing the bike infrastructure was in a small-ish city. One can get anywhere safely and comfortably in just a few minutes, and the network connects not only the city itself, but to outlying areas as well. And with the great separation and well thought-out junctions, there are no harrowing moments of cars and trucks passing inches from you while biking, which are everyday occurrences to most bike commuters in North America.
Nice @AboutHere cameo at 1:27 !!
I was having a conversation about this on Reddit. These solutions are relatively inexpensive, cost-effective, and absolutely worth it!
Biking is actually more feasible for smaller cities and towns, there's more of space to build them in alternative paths, there's more space to park bicycles, and scooters.
In crowded cities with many high rises, pedestrians + transit should be the priority, cycling infrastructure second.
0:16 as a Maritimer living in BC (albeit northern BC), where I've heard Toronto and Montréal referred to as the East Coast many times, this moment was very funny.
I never heard "east coast" BUT 100% "EAST" referring to Toronto/Montreal and the Manitoba/Ontario border is considered the WEST/EAST divide
it is called ''culture '' and education. I fell people in BC know more about USA and asia than Canada .
Great video. Edmonton is going through a pretty good urbanism renewal right now and they're dividing the city up into 15-minute districts (smaller than a city, larger than a neigjbourhood). These districts, which are sort of like small cities, actually make it easier and more efficient to plan walkable communities. Small cities need to become more walkable and bikeable before they become too big to walk and bike.
Walkable villages, in the ancient style, are nice to live in. Quiet and close to nature, yet no need to drive everywhere. Driving is only needed to reach the neighbouring village, the city, the campsite, etc. Children can also see their neighbours without relying on parents to drive them, and services such as hairdressing and groceries can be reached without driving. This combines the non-economic advantages of big city life with the advantages of rural life.
North American cities and towns need to start emulating the European mindset of being less car centric.
Love to see you cover my home town! Definitely love to see it, especially with our massive population growth over the last few years
Hey guys, I grew up in London, moved to Toronto (years I can never get back), then to Halifax and am now in Montreal. No wonder I like this channel!
So cool to hear people talking about Halifax! By what I'm used to, Halifax is still big.. but they clearly have quite a good development for their size. And I've read their plans.. they're on the right path!
Look at Karlsruhe in Germany. It's smaller than Halifax and its regional tram-train network reaches 50km outside the city.
Halifax could absolutely do something like this too, imagine if there was commuter rail service to windsor!
Halifax was the second city I visited in Canada, first one was Truro! Those two cities made me fall in love with the country.
one other thing I wanted to mention is how good Halifax does with mixed use neighborhoods(on the peninsula anyways) even really residential areas usually will have a corner store or two, a pharmacy or a coffee shop or a market or something like that, especially in the North end. Its something I love about this city that I find we do better than even most bigger cities, were I often find myself walking for 15 minutes just to get a bag of chips from a convenience store in some places!
Halifax has always been such a beautifully walkable city (at least downtown). I'm thrilled to see them getting some bike infra.
So surreal to see my home on your channel! I thought you did a great job with this video! I agree, we've got a long way to go but it really feels like we've been making big steps in the past 5 years and we have plans laid out to continue. Wish we were seeing bigger changes faster, but sometimes you have to take what you can get...
I'm a Vancouverite. I have never thought of Toronto or Montreal as being on the east coast. When I refer to those two cities, I would say central Canada, or back east. I can't think of anyone I know that would say otherwise.
I grew up in Vancouver, now live in Montreal. I know several people who do not know that I'm talking about the Quebec-Windsor corridor when I say central Canada. I think the fact that Manitoba and Saskatchewan are in the centre when you look at a map combined with the "out east" phrase to mean Toronto or Montreal leads a lot of people raised out west to not know the three generally agreed upon regions of Canada
"Kids deserve to be able to walk or ride bikes to school."
Please say that louder for the country on your southern border.
no one I know would let kids under 14 walk to school or ride a bike alone or even with friends, due to incidents of kidnapping. While a very small incidence, once you know it's a possibility, it just doesn't seem reasonable to send your little kid out on a street alone.
@@michah321prolly a suburban thing. I’m American and I’ve been walking to school since I’m 10 years old and I lived about a 20-25 minute walk away(I live in a small city w a metro of 150000)
@@papaicebreakerii8180 well that's good! Be careful.
I know! I’m less than 10 minutes from my school, but I can’t even bike there due to the only connection to the school being a busy stroad with no sidewalk
Looking forward to watching this! Love your content. Now I'm going to watch.
Appreciated!
I lived in Londonontario (that's how people pronounce it) for years and biked to work downtown a lot. There were fantastic multi-use pathways along the river, but there were missing safe links to get from the river paths to the actual core.
Before I moved away I was chatting with the deputy mayor about the need to protect some corridors for future transit right-of-ways. His response was "There's no need. We'll never be big enough for a subway." Sigh.
1:27 nice kick lol
I was just thinking about this yesterday! What a great video. There can be places which are bike friendly, walkable, with high density condos/apartments with quality amenities that aren't always mega-cities. Great work! I can think of multiple off the top of my head here in the lower 48.
Really happy to see a video on Halifax :)
I think you guys did a great job explaining the kind of attitude Halifax has toward urbanism - we have a fairly progressive council and we are slowly moving in the right direction, but it seems like we’re too scared to really make big changes to break away from the status quo.
Our provincial government also loves to get in the way of good things. For example, council has approved a really nice-looking plan for a proper BRT system, but the province is unwilling to do their part in funding it. (Not to mention that the province is now fast-tracking a bunch of sprawl developments on the edges of the city). Not to put all the blame on the province - council could also do things better - but NS doesn’t make it any easier.
Basically, there are lots of plans to do really great things but it seems like we have issues with actually getting anything done. It’s the same thing with bike infrastructure - we were supposed to have a lot more than we do by now.
Halifax and Victoria have ONE "big city" issue and that is lack of LAND to "sprawl" onto
developers / banks LOVE LOW DENSITY / LOW COST developments that sell for high markups and the well known "always expanding" economies makes "urbanism a HARD SELL
Was looking for the BRT mention in the comments, thank you! Such a shame :(
thanks for doing this. Here in NJ, we have lots of small municipalities. My town has a population of about 12,000. BUT, the density in NJ is on a par with the Netherlands. My town has a higher population density than Atlanta and many other American cities.
But when you talk about things related to "urbanism" people in my town immediately assume it's not for the us. "That might work in NY, but not in our small town". That's an incorrect understanding.
I love those old radio clips. A great reminder that people have been fighting the good fight for a long time.
That Uytae Lee cameo at 1:27 from his time in Montreal!
Oh my goodness please come to Winnipeg. We are so stuck here. Rampant NIMBYism, short term mindset, half-ass everything. We dig ourselves a little deeper every year.
And just a short boat ride away from Halifax is the coastal town of Portland, Maine, which also has fabulous (and very similar looking) urbanism for a small city.
I went to university in Victoria which is basically Halifax's west coast identical twin. My experience was very similar and I bring it up to people all the time. It's the perfect city for students, and there are a lot of them there but it's not a true college town either, it's a rea city in its own right. Because of the cities relative age and close together destinations it's perfect for students who can't afford a car. But nobody will even fathom the possibility of rail based transit of any kind. Seriously, never had a conversation go past a 5 sentence exchange about it.
I see more and more discussions about it now though, as well as quite a bit of urbanist thinking/terminology leaking into city planning. Getting BRT along the main corridors between the various municipalities is almost inevitable at this point (think one is already under construction). That should be a nice incremental step to see what paths and what types of rail transport would be most appropriate for the region.
@@Tuasmanque yes, I believe you are right. From what I gather they are copying Translink's RapidBus both in name and application (which if you don't know is like downgraded BRT.) Last time I was in Vic they had built a bunch of new cue jumps for the 70. Great news! They especially need bus lanes and better stations downtown. I just find it interesting how hard it is for people to imagine the CRD having rail transit.
I grew up in Victoria and even when I was younger in the 90's Transit was talked about with streetcars down town and "heavy" metro running towards Calwood to bypass / alleviate the "Calwood crawl" traffic jams that happened as people left work in Victoria / Saanich and headed towards the "northern communities"
@@jasonriddell colwood crawl is still alive and well. And still called that even by car less uni students who’ve never even been to colwood lol. They just did a huge highway project and surprise surprise it didn’t do a heck of a lot. I heard there was a train service up island in the 90s? That’s gone now.
I think it's safe to say the Colwood Crawl is a big reason the first rapidbus line is going to be along that downtown-westshore corridor. As far as I can tell this would've happened even without the snafu that was the McKenzie overpass project, but having in recent memory that certainly helps with public support.
I think smaller cities can learn a few lessons from Emmen, the Netherlands. It's a city of ~100k people and essentially the answer to "what if the Dutch had more space?" For Dutch metrics, it's very car friendly, and does have lots of visitors from the rural areas around it. In terms of flats and towers, there are only a few. However, it still has fully separated bicycle infrastructure, and cycling is generally safe anywhere.
Two of my favorite missing middle fairly dense cities in America are Lancaster PA and Frederick MD. Absolutely gorgeous architecture and walkable historic districts.
Most East PA cities are dense like that. I mean a lot of them have seen better days but they all have good bones
Lived in Halifax for 2 years in the late 80's while my wife was getting her masters at Dalhousie. Without a car, didn't even have a drivers license, we rarely even needed to leave the Halifax Peninsula with almost everything within a easy walk and occasional the bus. Still miss Halifax.
The required density for walkability and for transit to be economically viable is laughably low. The current number is around 25 people per acre. Considering the fact that the average US household in 2022 had 2.5 people and 1/10th acre lots are not uncommon in urban areas, you can theoretically achieve that density with just detached single family housing (not that I prefer that). I think walking/cycling/transit infrastructure is totally possible in most cities, as long as the city makes a commitment to it.
1:10 I think anyone that has seen any video from the NotJustBikes channel, has heard about this city. He is responsible for many views changing on how infrastructure should be, and opened the door for people to be interested on knowing and researching more about this topic. I (personally) got interested on the content of this channel, because of all the changes on my personal perspective, after watching the videos from NotJustBikes. 🙂
Halifax's transit ridership numbers are awesome for such a smaller metro area, as sure the attitude towards bike lanes!
Halifax is an interesting subject aright now. We are experiencing immense growth at the moment, over 20,000 people moved into the city last year alone, and there are plans for even more growth. This influx of people is almost forcing the city to pick up urbanist planning unintentionally in order to attempt to house the new people arriving and provide them ways to get around without clogging up existing roadways.
Almost every development that is coming up lately is mixed use residential towers with commercial ground level spaces. Bike lanes and transit improvements are happening because they know damn well what tens of thousands more motorists would do to the city.
Problem is this is still only really happening in the core (and a couple popular suburbs) and the rest of the city is kind of being ignored. Transit "fixes" improved service among busy corridors, but they left those in areas off the core routes often in worse conditions, with service levels reduced in frequency and sometimes ending earlier in the day than before the changes.
Bike infrastructure is certainly improving on the peninsula and in downtown Dartmouth, but outlying areas like Spryfield are woefully unserviced. A "safe" bike trip downtown from Spryfield requires using painted bike gutters on a dangerous road (at least one notable bike accident sent someone to the trauma ward recently) and sidewalks, or if you want to take a more protected way, you have to bike completely out of your way to Fairview and then use the meandering infrastructure and back streets from that direction, turning a 20 minute bike ride into around 40 minutes.
That same influx of population that is driving more urbanist development though is also massively driving up our cost of housing due to lack of it available, and also contributing to a massive health crisis as we do not have nearly enough doctors, nurses, and paramedics to serve the existing population, never mind the massive growth. This is causing a major backlash against the urbanist developments as people are rightfully concerned about where government priorities are lying.
Is it reasonable though to expect frequent service out in the burbs? People make their choices about where to live, and those have consequences. In the core? Transit, walkable. Burbs? Designed to use a car to get everywhere.
@@bearcubdaycare congratulations. You've just hit on why the suburbs suck.
@OG0dinwolf more specifically suburbs designed with primarily single family home zoning. If more mixed use zoning was legal throughout both urban and suburban areas like you will find in a lot of European municipalities, there would be more of an expectation of greater transit and active transportation infrastructure throughout. The Netherlands was on a path to more car-centric development just a little over 30 years ago, until them made a conscious effort to make a change. It starts with political willpower, and until we can convince a majority of Halifax's suburban councilors to look at urbanism in a positive light, convince more MLAs and by extension the Premier help develop better policies to support urbanist visions, and convince more of the public that live in the suburbs of the benefits for them as much as for those who live on or near the peninsula/downtown Dartmouth, the more likelihood we will see more positive change throughout the HRM, not just in the areas that are already fairly dense.
@@bearcubdaycare That's the problem: All of the development and efforts to improve infrastructure are focused on the core, with relatively few efforts to densify the suburban areas, make them more functional as standalone neighbourhoods so people don't need to drive into the core to do everything, or establish better transit routes that will allow them to get to the peninsula (noting that many of the people who have been priced out of living on the peninsula still have to work there) without driving. The peninsula has exactly five roads that go to and from it, only one of which has any real potential to expand (two are bridges, two are right on the coast and have no room to grow, and the last one is a more typical highway but feeds into city streets that can't handle much more traffic than they already do without bulldozing a huge chunk of the city). It's not a question of what level of transit service is reasonable to expect in the burbs. It's a question of what level of transit service needs to be provided to the burbs to keep the city from being gridlocked for ten hours a day.
It's also worth noting that the Spryfield-Downtown trip mentioned here is only about 10 km. We're not talking about some far-flung suburb that only the most hardcore cyclists would ever try biking from. There are quite a few decent hills involved (which is just the nature of biking anywhere in Halifax), but it's well within reasonable cycling commute distance. The only reason it's not particularly viable is the road design and lack of infrastructure, which should absolutely be called out as a design failure (there's zero reason the road in question couldn't have a protected bike lane instead of a painted bike gutter) and not dismissed as being somehow inevitable because it's a suburb. Even the HRM's suburbs are relatively dense and not tremendously far from the city centre; it really would not take much to move away from car-centric design to something that works better and can grow sustainably.
You can really see the decades in Halifax's street design. Having grown up in downtown and later moving to Dartmouth, I have to say the difference was painful and had severe negative impacts on my development. That being said, Dartmouth was still somehow nicer than the suburbs where I live now, because for all the cul de sacs and bizarrely aligned streets, there was also an incredible system of walking paths to help me get around. Even when my school was on the other side of a lake, there were forest shortcuts I could take, or at the very least a decent sidewalk on the regular route, and a nearby bus terminal with an express bus to Dalhousie and St Marys (which had signal priority). Of course, it was still completely unwalkable, and ridiculously hilly to the point that biking was just not an option, and the isolation of being in a suburb did take its toll on me compared to the connectivity of downtown.
Yay Halifax coverage! I do think that in certain areas on the peninsula, the 15 minute neighbourhood has properly been achieved. It is exciting to see the development of mixed zoning slowly trickle out.
Great video. Smaller cities should dream bigger.
I lived in Halifax for many years and enjoyed the waterfront area. I then moved to Banff and then Calgary. While Banff is very walkable, I found downtown Calgary to be a place best to avoid if one does not work there as there is not much to do there during the day. I do miss the Halifax/Dartmouth waterfronts with its Busker Festival and other lively activities. I used to walk around Halifax a lot and it felt welcoming plus I could avoid major roads by cutting through various neighbourhoods. Here in Calgary, most neighbourhoods are cut off from each other with fences, often by major roadways that are always super busy.
In March of last year I had to move away from Halifax, the city I grew up in, because it was too expensive for me to live there. As someone who doesn't drive it that city is still very unfriendly unless you are actually downtown. I live in Vancouver now and have a one bedroom that is only $100 more than my bachelor in Halifax, and my wage is half again higher. The large population growth people champion in Halifax over the last few years have left a lot of us native Haligonians in the dust. I'm always sad to see videos about one of my favourite cities I'll never live in again.
Thank you so much for a video on Halifax! I’ve lived here almost my whole life and there have been major improvements lately. You mentioned the transit corridor on Spring Garden, and the main reason it failed is because they decided to start the “pilot project” at the exact time that a parallel street (the best detour route for drivers) was closed for replacing pipes. I think they have plans to return it and I really hope they do!
the main reason it failed is because they expect drivers to respect small signs, as it that works for anything else. Simple bollards to allow bus through, but stop cars is what was needed.
Wow, how much digging did you guys do to find that radio recording? Strange how many of his points still echo and resonate today.
It was a great find that we just lucked into when browsing the archives!
I lived in Halifax while the Spring Garden work was being done and then afterwards as well and not once did I ever hear that it was supposed to be a dedicated but lane. Like this is literally the first time I've heard that. Wild.
It makes sense looking at the design of the road which now gets extremely clogged, but every intersection along that stretch is just open and it's not at all obvious that cars are only meant to cross and not turn onto Spring Garden.
I've been advocating for more urbanist ideas in my small city of 65,000. There are challenges that come along with it, but I see a lot of potential, the benefit of a city this size is it already isn't super spread out, sure it is for it's size, but on a human scale, you could bike from one end of the city to the other in around 30 minutes, this means fewer miles of bike infrastructure has a big impact, the city has a bus service, and I've found it's decent in many ways, but there is a lot of potential for it to be monumentally better for a very affordable cost to taxpayers. I'm working on starting a blog to discuss these issues more in detail to target at people who live here, I'm combining it with information on city services, government, things to do, and even ways to save money to attract readers to the blog, and I've been networking with some more forward thinking groups and professional organizations in the city.
I saw my building!! Twice actually! And probably more since there were a few Toronto clips
Hey, that's where I am!
It's been quite gratifying to see Halifax develop and become significantly more liveable over the last 20-30 years.
I live in an area where small rural towns of under 2,000 rresidents When I told a city councilmen that it would be nice to be able to walk or bike from any point in the town to any other point in the town, they balked at the idea wondering "why would anyone want to do that?" To say the least, only the "old core" of the town (build in the early 1920s) is even remotely walkable. The councilmen then went on about how adding sidewalks and dedicated bike lanes is completely impractical because the town is "too spread out".
@@WillmobilePlus You act as if there is some sort of zero sum where improving and expanding pedestrian, cycling, and mass transit infrastructure must come at the expense of cars. Not only is that obviously rediculus, but shows that you are the extreamist. You think cars should be the only option.
@@WillmobilePlus
> sidewalks cost a LOT of money.
Guess what, roads cost a lot more money to both build and maintain. And yet, you don’t see people complaining that a road exists. But that also isn't an argument against expanding pedestrian and cycling infrastructure.
> not to mention utterly useless in a rural area because the amount of cars that come through doesn't warrant it
Pedestrian and cycling infrastructure is as useful in rural areas as roads are. In fact, I would argue they would be MORE useful in a rural area than in an urban environment.
> many of the roads may be under the jurisdiction of your state's DOT
Then why do I see sidewalks along the state roads when they pass through the "old" parts of town? It's because those towns chose to build them back in the 20s and 30s and put up bonds to finance for them.
Given that I live town of a similar population size (albeit in Germany) but perfectly walkable, all I can say is "Damn...".
Wishing something local will happen in Hobart, but I feel like we're more likely going to need a NZ-style intervention
Recently a truck stopped traffic for hours, and it brought back memories of when we could've built 1 piece of major public transport for 1/5 the cost of a single highway bridge they're building instead
Thanks for covering Canadian city urban design and advocating for healthier, more walkable and bikable neighbourhoods. Something far too many Canadian cities seem to be going in the opposite direction with. Check out Manitoba cities for some horror stories. A big, brand new neighbourhood and not ONE grocery store within reasonable walking or biking distance. Not one STORE period within walking/biking distance. And even if you wanted to bike - very unsafe, almost no dedicated biking lanes and a big main road to go past to get to the major shopping centre.
The problem is the system incentives. We live in a very anti-economical system where the healthy, just and sustainable thing to do, based on science, isn't often done because it doesn't comply with the maximize profit and competitive self-interest demand of the market system. All backwards economics. But so many people don't recognize the root problem.
I still appreciate the look at these cities and showing what good urban design does look like and how it CAN be done in Canadian cities.
halifax looks like such a pleasant place with much bigger bones than its population would suggest.
Nice video! I visited Halifax this summer and was really impressed with the walkability downtown, although I was less impressed with the roads in other parts of the city.
Thank you so much for covering small cities in this video! Though i do find it funny that we in North America consider a city with a population of 350k "small." In Europe that would be a major city with several regional rail connections and commuter rail, plus like 3-4 tram lines, lol.
I think it's very important to highlight that urbanism is something that affects everyone, not just big cities, and I think you do a great job illustrating that with this video. In some ways, smaller cities in North America can benefit more from density and transit, because there's less pressure from state DoTs (or whatever the Canadian equivalent is) to push through massive highways to support the higher populations.
I really do hope that we can expand urbanism from being only a big city concept to also covering our smaller cities. Thanks for your hard work!
The way you always talk about Montréal one would think that it is a paradise and one would be right.
Nice one, fight for it,I lived in the Netherlands and oh boy whatan amazing countryto cycle from the big cities to a small vilages, andow do I miss that healthy and practical cycling
Bicycle infrastucture in useful in towns of every size. Even in towns with a population of only 10,000 people, the main roads should have cycling lanes.
This point is really important. Adding to the arguments of the video, if we think at the regional level, we need smaller city to be less car-dependant to make sure an eventual railroad network would be popular enough to justify its existence. Even though it is possible and quite easy to live car-free in Montréal for example, it's really hard to get out of the city and go visit smaller cities without using a car and folks of smaller cities are encouraged to keep their car as it is the best way to meet their transportation needs at the local and regional level.
Thanks for this video. I advocate for improving transit and active transportation infrastructure in my town of Whitehorse,Yukon. I often struggle to dispute the opposition that says Whitehorse is too small for such accommodations.
Whitehorse has a population of about 35,000 people or about 10% of Halifax. I am interested in your views on urbanism int this size category.
1:26 I like how you chose to keep this clip and not discard it despite the guy doing a high kick. XD
He's a fellow Canadian urbanist, Uytae Lee. I wouldn't be surprised if they were all traveling together :)
Add Kingston to your list of cities that tore up productive tram lines. I would love to see your interpretation of Kingston in of these videos!
Damn I have so much love for Halifax. Moving there after highschool was my first introduction to a car-free lifestyle and it had such a profound impact on me. Also lmao at my little cameo
Small towns need to think about transit as much as any big town. It's better to begin as early as possible too if they hope to grow it.
As an American, y'all and NJB make what to avoid London like the Plague!
London Ontario is probably better than 90% of the places in the US.
My only critique: The metropolitan area of Halifax is home to roughly 480,000. 13th largest municipality in Canada. (12th if you amalgamate Hamilton with the GTA)
The census statistics provided (population and commuting figures) were not for the census metropolitan area (CMA), they were for the population centre (POPCTR). Halifax's CMA boundaries are abnormally large and rural due to the size of HRM. Population centre boundaries (previously called "urban area" boundaries) are usually a better comparison of cities, because they ignore municipal boundaries and simply count all connected urban/suburban development.
In other words, when giving statistics on Halifax as a city, we want to include Dartmouth and Bedford but not Enfield or Sheet Harbour or all the other towns and rural areas that aren't functionally part of the "city".
7:00
10 min _ride_ from a grocery store
Where I live, grocery stores are mostly within a 5 min _walk._ I have 6 grocery stores within a 5 min walk door to door 😀
Most people in Halifax are closer too. I calculated a 10 minute bike ride as the extreme case for people living on the edge of the peninsula.
@@OhTheUrbanity , I see but this extreme case scenario is unimaginable for me :)
We've got two huge grocery networks in my country. One of them got really aggressive a few years ago and started occupying land so that no other competitors can fit in. It's become so ubiquitous that some of its stores nearly face each other across a street. A meme got viral then with a futuristic cityscape all covered in its shop-signs. Both networks also penetrate in every new residential development and occupy the usually commercial first floor of every residential high-rise.
If I'm not mistaken, Starbucks had a similar aggressive policy to become the default coffee place.
I could think of low density suburbs but I don't consider them part of the city. However, suburbs are not residential-only so they have some facilities pretty close to single family homes, unlike in the US or Canada.
And while I'm at it, not all places are as lucky. Some cities allow pure residential-only high-rise districts. We call them human ant-hills. No schools, no kindergartens, bad public transport, traffic jams. Just infinite high-rise fields with no vision other than developers making money as fast as possible.
Victoria BC is the perfect comparison for Halifax. Greater Victoria has a population of 400,000, it's a coastal city with a dense core, and a growing number of protected bike lanes.
You should check out Lincoln Nebraska or Madison Wisconsin! They are two small State Capitals with great dedicated cycling infrastructure.
You should consider visiting Victoria, BC.
It is pretty much a twin of Halifax but on the west coast. It is the 7th most dense city in canada, number one in mode shift away from cars in Canada, and has a walkscore of 76 and bikescore of 80. These statistics being so high are probably partly due to weird municipal boundaries, but still impressive for north america. Victoria also has a lot of nice "urban villages" which are nice walkable areas outside of downtown. There have been a lot of new protected bike lanes recently, but unfortunately the transit isn't the best.
Victoria is the capital of BC . All capitals in the world have better infrastructures . Not only in Victoria . Why everybody in BC is chauvinist ?
@@Swiss2025 All capital cities do not necessarily have better infrastructure than other cities, especially if the other city is larger than the capital. Even though I think that victoria is relatively good for urbanism for its size in North America, I would say that Vancouver has better infrastructure. For example, the transit system in Vancouver is much better than Victoria's.
So true car centric places are by choice and not reserved for big cities. My small Ontario town is a bit car centric if you live too far from the core. Besides that, I usually feel pretty safe biking and walking to all my needs. I am moving to a largish city in Ontario with better bike infrastructure than London, Ontario. I am going to be in between places for a short time but one area we will be is very car centric even though it has multi-use paths. However, another part of the city is way more walkable and less car centric.
Uytae!! 😅
Halifax has a lot of potential for bike infrastructure. Probably more so than the cities on the prairies in terms of the mindset of the locals. Nice to see they've already made a (tentative) start!
I still see people crying online over not having Harbour Drive, saying that the resistance to it was an example of elitist south-enders blocking the utility of poor suburbanites who need to drive from Dartmouth to Spryfield. As someone who wants to destroy the South End mcmansions and install dense public housing, I would rather that area still be free from a highway disconnecting Point Pleasant Park from the rest of the city!
I lived in Halifax for a couple years before I had to move away for work just prior to the pandemic, and I've been longing to get back. It's a city with such good bones and potential if there was a proper push to keep developing it around modern (or 100 year old) urbanist principles. Even off the peninsula itself there are lots of good areas that could be made even better with just a little bit more active and public transportation and loosening of low-density mandates.
And good lord there's a need to reduce car traffic getting on/off the peninsula. It's hard to imagine anyone thinking waiting in line at the Armdale Roundabout is the best way to get to work, were there other practical options available.
Just looking at the thumbnail I thought the city was Wellington, NZ, another small Anglosphere city that punches above its weight for urbanism.